Dec 27
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Saturday, December 27, 2008 in
Fan fiction, StoriesAuthor’s note: Another bit of fan fiction. I have to admit that I run hot and cold in respect of David Tennant’s Doctor. Tennant is a good actor, and when he reaches deep inside the acting box he can turn out a fine performance. I suspect the problem has been the material he’s had to work with, which has him all over the place, like a Time Lord with bipolar disorder. He’s also not had the same journey as Christopher Eccleston had as the Ninth Doctor, and seems too populist. However, when I decided to write a Tennant story, I found I quite liked the character and was even able to get past my pretentious dislike of his continuous use of the sonic screwdriver to get out of tough corners.
The story was written as an exercise while I was writing other stories to keep my juices flowing and remind me what it was that I like about writing, and writing science fiction. Hence the story is loaded with over the top sci-fi ideas, but with a basic message about life at the bottom of it.
It also grew out of my desire to have a Q-like agency in the Doctor Who universe. Q was one of my favourite characters in Star Trek The Next Generation. A completely amoral all powerful entity, Q would pop up and in a mischevious camp way cause trouble for the prim and proper Jean-Luc Picard. I don’t know if I really succeeded, but perhaps if I revisit the concept, I’ll develop the idea a bit further.
Disclaimer: as you all should know, Doctor Who, the TARDIS and all related elements are owned wholly by the BBC. I have no rights to the characters or situations and present this story for entertainment value only.
Parsimonious Rex wandered around on metal spider-legs. A giant pickled thunder lizard general, the greatest reptile brain of his generation, P. Rex had been preserved and kept alive in a huge exoskeleton, reputedly designed by Davros during a time of negative cash flow. Quite how alive he remained was a matter of debate, but the way that he was currently staggering around the great hall of Tantalus, barely avoiding the giant marble statues representing the planet’s prevailing humours, seemed to suggest that he was not as alive as he probably ought to be.
The Doctor stared up at the glass front to the walking machine as it passed him by and whistled.
‘You are definitely the second biggest pickled sentient dinosaur I have ever seen,’ he said. ‘Well, I say second biggest, you’re definitely in the top five, the top ten at the outside. Well, I’ve certainly not seen a bigger preserved carnosaur in the last twenty four hours.’
(more…)
Dec 24
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Wednesday, December 24, 2008 in
Stories
Author’s Note: Had to put this one up because it covers ground similar to that covered by Neal Stephenson in Anathem. (As does Stories!) It was written for SFX Magazine’s Pulp Idol Competition last year, but wasn’t really pulp so didn’t come anywhere. Also the style is a little stiff. I have expanded it from what was submitted to SFX, as the word count allowed was 2,500 words. This meant that the first part of the story, arguably the most important, was short-changed. I also considered pitching it to Hub magazine, but while I really love the concept, I find the execution is a bit off. It also represents a sub-genre in my work that I think of as anti-romance, and which I finally wrote my way out of recently with a couple of stories called A Hero Dies But One Death and Back From The Dead, which will appear shortly.
Tonight I kill myself for the second time. The corpse I leave behind is already ten years old, decayed too fast. I don’t envy the forensic scientist who has to puzzle out that conundrum. If the body is found, that is.
I hope it’s not.
I glance around my home, my accumulated knickknacks, gadgets, statues and toys, and allow myself a moment of introspection, wondering how I have come to this: homicide and suicide bound together in one act.
Do I really want to leave this again? I’ve already rebuilt my life once before. It’s a lot of effort to get back to the place you were. But I’m not happy and if you’re in a bad situation you have to move on. This world is broken. My life lacks balance and teeters on its axis.
***
(more…)
Dec 23
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Tuesday, December 23, 2008 in
StoriesAuthor’s note: And so, just to give the lie to the fact that this whole thing is going to be science fiction, here’s a little urban fantasy I wrote ooh four or five years ago. Benny and Burke, the protagonists, were created in the playground when I was eight. I was Benny (it was the nickname I gave myself), my friend Craig Roe was Burke (after the character in Trap Door). They’ve changed quite a bit since then and I dare say that they’ll reappear on this site before long.
In Glasgow snow was falling, making the streets wet and dangerous.
The house of Ignatius Clark, in contrast, was warm and well-furnished, and befitted a man of means. The living room had been adorned with tasteful art and accoutrements that bespoke the use of an interior designer. The kitchen was all stainless steel and clever devices. The bedroom, though, was the room of interest to Benny Stock and Craig Burke. Not because of the rich silk sheets and the mirror over the bed, but because it was the current resting place of Ignatius’ stilled form.
The body was face down on the bed, fully clothed. One arm was positioned under the chest, the other bent at a right angle. Burke bent down to take the pulse of the wrist on the free arm.
‘That’s one dead bugger,’ he said.
‘Well they told us he was,’ said Benny, looking in the wardrobe in the corner of the room. He stared in at the dead man’s clothes and wrinkled his nose. ‘Didn’t you believe them?’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time an operator’s come back crying over a dead body, only for the corpse to be walking about when the clean-up crew break in.’ Burke hefted the body over and grimaced. ‘Maybe we can do a slip in the shower scenario.’
‘Do we know who we’re covering up for?’ asked Benny, wandering over to examine the corpse himself. His hand hovered over the head. ‘Oof. That would really hurt. Wasn’t this meant to have been an accident?’
‘Probably an impromptu interrogation gone bad,’ said Burke. ‘Huh. Most of the blood is soaked into the pillow; whoever did this didn’t do a bad job of cleaning up. Take that and the counterpane. See if you can dig out some replacements and I’ll stick laughing boy in the bath.’ (more…)
Dec 21
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Sunday, December 21, 2008 in
CriticismMostly this site is going to be about what I’ve written, or am writing, but I’m also someone who thinks they’re clever and that their opinions on stuff are important and impart universal truths (hey, this is the internet) so from time to time (or rather to fill the gaps when I’ve nothing new to post…) I’ll talk about stuff that inspires me. Y’know, kind of like a blog…
At the moment I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (and also one of the Saint books by Leslie Charteris, but that’s for another day). It’s a good book, very engrossing, and despite the fact that like all of Stephenson’s books it’s big enough for you to hollow out and live inside, I’m getting through it quite quickly. (Quicker than I’m getting through Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, anyway… And I still haven’t finished Lord of the Rings, which I started reading when I was eight…)
The book has a main plot which moves very slowly (kind of like Moby Dick or, and this comparison is more apt, the Brothers Karamazov) and is peppered along the way by primers for scientific schools of thought. These digressions into thought experiments are fun, although I feel like I’ve seen them before. This may be because I wrote my BA dissertation on Philip K. Dick and so read a lot of stuff about the nature of reality (including Plato’s Republic and some summaries of Kant) back then, but also because last year I read Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality and this year I’ve been working my way through Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas R. Hoftstadter. But this is part of the text, as there is much talk about how all ideas already exist in some form or another. It also brings out the old story that calculus is probably the only way that we’ll be able to communicate with an alien species if we ever encounter one. I can’t disagree that I don’t believe that language will be the way forward in any such encounter, but I think we have to accept that just because all we can think of is numbers, it doesn’t mean other lifeforms will. But I digress…
What I’m really intrigued by, as someone who had to make a choice between science and art (I did English, Maths, Biology and Chemistry at A level) and therefore still looks fondly on at what scientists are up to, is the world that Stephenson has built for the novel. The main characters are all scientists/scholars, brought up in the scientific disciplines to search for proofs and to work on theories. But the microcosm society that they live in (a hermetically sealed complex called a concent, which keeps them away from the general populace or extramuros) is so clearly based on religious trappings, that it puts the lie to the more extreme science-worshippers like Richard Dawkins. The scientists/scholars are referred to as the avout, with it’s clear connotations of the devout, and particularly influential thinkers are raised to the position of Saunt, a contraction of savant, but deliberately evocative of saint. Science at the moment cannot be held up as a way of life, because as yet it does not teach us about how to live our lives. It tells us how to evaluate, but tells us nothing of forgiveness, or the higher social concepts that we have developed.
So a good book, but the bits that are making me think and bending my mind, are the implicit elements of the book, the bits that warrant the huge page count. Anyway, next post I intend to talk about why a lot of the stuff that you’ll see on this site will be science fiction-y (although science fantasy is probably a better descriptor) and why that’s important to me.
Dec 20
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Saturday, December 20, 2008 in
Fan fiction, StoriesNote from the Author: This is the first part of a story that originally appeared in the Charity fanzine, The Cat Who Walked Through Time, which was edited by the talented and brilliant Alryssa and Tom Kelly, way back in 2001. I’ve updated the text a little to iron out kinks in syntax and meaning as I’ve grown as a writer in the time since it was originally published.
Disclaimer: as you all should know, Doctor Who, the TARDIS and all related elements are owned wholly by the BBC. I have no rights to the characters or situations and present this story for entertainment value only.
A beginning:
Entwined around and throughout, above and below the universe, the time vortex is a hydra-like collection of glowing blue coils of energy. The coils writhe and undulate as if caught in eternal peristalsis and cosmic reflux. In places, they contract and the blue darkens to indigo and then violet; in others, they expand so far that their thinness renders them white. And sometimes the entire endless structure takes on an autumnal bent, fragmenting into rings of sepia and even red – all colours at once.
Of course, this is a fallacy. The time vortex is a structure that exists outside our local reality, just to the left of our understanding of how the universe works. It remains apart from all, even as it bisects it. Certainly it is not visible to the human eye. But the human mind, grasping and insecure, can never admit that, and so as Tegan Jovanka, air stewardess on the wrong flight, stares at the TARDIS scanner, she sees what she thinks a time vortex might look like.
‘Beautiful, it’s just so… beautiful,’ she whispers. Then she glances around self-consciously, to ensure that her companions have not eavesdropped on this rare moment of quantum contemplation. The others, she has decided, only think of her as cynical and aggressive. That serves Tegan perfectly well and she would not wish it to change. She may not be some kind of alien super-genius, but that doesn’t mean she should be treated as an imbecile.
Gazing out into the collapsing uncertainties for a lingering moment longer, she returns to the geometric edges of the control console and closes the scanner’s shutters. The console, straight edges rendered in Formica, bristles with knobs, levers, toggles, switches, counters, monitors and buttons. Tegan wishes, not for the first time, that she knew how to operate it. She would take it to places that the Doctor would not even consider. There are so many things she wants to see in person, so many interesting peoples she wishes she could meet… That was why she became an air stewardess in the first place. All the Doctor seems to do is sweep his band of adventurers from one disaster to another. It’s hard to absorb an alien culture when it’s busy trying to assimilate your body and soul.
Definitely no time for Gertrude Stein or the Palace of Versailles or the Great Wall of China: the Doctor would complain, I’ve already been there! There’s so much uncharted territory; surely that’s the greater challenge? Like a five year old, packing jam sandwiches and orange juice and planning an expedition to the source of the Amazon. Meanwhile Nyssa would still be asking for someone to explain all the references to her, and Turlough… Well, she wasn’t sure about Turlough. After all, the truant public schoolboy had only been aboard the TARDIS half a day.
Somewhere, out in the labyrinth of identical corridors that made up the interior of the TARDIS, the Doctor was guiding his newest adopted stray through the local conveniences. No doubt he would be lecturing the young man breathily about block transfer computations and zero point energy.
Tegan sighs, lamenting lost dreams, and decides that the only thing for it is a long, hot bath. She turns towards the door to the interior, but only crosses half the distance before there is a loud crash and the console room tilts savagely like the deck of a ship in a tempest and she finds herself sprawling on the floor. As she rolls into the wall, the light level in the room fluctuates wildly and a loud screech emits from the control console itself.
A cry for help tears out of her throat.
‘Doc-torrrrr!’
***
The Doctor stops talking halfway through a sentence detailing the basic principle on which the food machine works and he twists his head to stare out of the kitchen door. Turlough moves with uncomfortable speed, to follow the Doctor’s gaze, and feels a cold gush of relief when the thing he has reason to fear waits offstage has not heard its cue. The Doctor clearly does not share the emotion: his brow darkens.
‘Tegan!’ he yells as he begins to run away from Turlough. His advance is soon arrested though, when he doubles up in pain and collapses to the floor. He lies there, clutching the sides of his chest and baring his teeth, eyes closed tightly in pain. His breath comes out in small hisses.
Unsure what to do, Turlough timorously makes his way to the side of the man who has saved him from an exile amongst dullards and dares to gingerly and briefly place a hand on the fallen Time Lord’s shoulder.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
***
Nyssa sits on her bed. Unwanted tears have coursed down her cheeks, drawing her mascara down with them in long black streaks. She has been thinking of her father again. The encounter with Mawdryn and his companions, their desire to steal the regenerative abilities of the Doctor; all reminds her of the manner in which the Master had stolen Tremas’ body to prolong his life, and that the Doctor is convinced that his nemesis has displaced her father’s soul irrevocably. Her family, her people, the planet she was born on, are all dead at the hands of this vile being who laughs at death even as he dispatches others into its care. The only future she can envision is one of solitude, and that the TARDIS will be her home until the end of her span.
She cannot staunch the tears that come, try as she might. She had assumed that she would raise a family, that she would take a lover, that she would enter the Ephemeral College and probe the Universe, mapping the uncertainties and the imaginary numbers.
Trakenites are taught to use such negativity, to appraise it and see how it will serve them in creating a greater good. As such Nyssa is doing her best to beat the shadows on her soul, has turned her attentions inward, and is unready when the wall beside her turns to liquid and dissolves into nothing. It happens so quickly that she does not even have time to scream.
(more…)
